Christopher Buehlman - The Necromancer's House

“Well, maybe the tour’s not completely over. I want to show you a movie.”

“Okay,” she says. “As long as it’s not Papillon .”

Down the stairs to the media room.

He turns the lights on, dims them, actually uses the wall switch.

He goes to the combination-locked cedar trunk wherein fifty or so cassettes stand in alphabetized rows, bearing strips of Scotch tape; the tapes on the left are for the famous— Muhammad ALI , Isaac ASIMOV , Sir Winston CHURCHILL , Harry HOUDINI (no sound) , John LENNON , et cetera. The ones on the right, fewer in number, are not alphabetized, and many have no last name: Marisol , DAD , SARAH , Aunt Katie , Bill BARNETT .

A separate locked box sits at the bottom of the chest.

“What’s in that?” Anneke says.

“You always want the forbidden fruit, don’t you?”

“Don’t you?”

“Yes. I guess we all do. All of us who do this. The box has tapes of dead users.”

“Why is it locked?”

“They’re dangerous. They can still cast spells. One of them’s actually not dead—he just left it as an insurance policy. But you need a different kind of magic, I think.”

Andrew takes the tape reading Bill WILSON from the bottom left.

“That’s not…” she says.

“Yes.”

She looks at the tape.

Shakes her head no.

Andrew sets it on the VCR in front of the television.

He puts his arm around her and she allows it.

They snuggle in on the leather couch, the needle of the intimacy meter moving further away from “buddies,” but stopping shy of “lovers.” He just holds her, pets her hair, until at last she nods.

He puts the tape in.

Bill speaks.

“Every AA member knows that he has to conform to the principles of recovery. His life actually depends upon obedience to spiritual principles…”

“Can he hear us?” she whispers.

“Not yet.”

Andrew kisses the top of Anneke’s head, separates himself from her enough for decorum, prepares himself to open the trapdoor.

“…If he deviates too far, the penalty is sure and swift. He sickens and finally dies.”

“Bill Wilson. It’s Andrew Blankenship.”

Bill continues, oblivious.

“He comes to understand that no personal sacrifice is too great for the preservation of this fellowship.”

“Bill, can you hear me?”

Apparently not.

“He learns that the clamor of desires and ambitions within him must be silenced whenever these could damage the group.”

“Bill Wilson.”

Bill ignores him.

Andrew stops the tape.

Rewinds.

Plays.

The same thing happens, or, rather, doesn’t happen.

“Something’s wrong.”

“No shit,” she says.

He goes through the song and dance again, gets a little further.

“…It becomes plain that the group must survive, or the individual will not.”

“Bill Wilson, hello.”

Bill continues.

But something changes.

His New England accent goes Slavic.

“…And when the individual doesn’t survive, ho, hey! This is a tragedy, small in the grand mechanic of things, but signifying to those who know and care for him…”

Andrew blinks dumbly at the screen.

He senses magic.

She does, too.

“Fuck,” he says.

“What’s happening?”

He grabs her knee, leans forward, intrigued and spooked.

“…and if there is a God, perhaps signifying big deal to him. But there is no God.”

Bill is angry—his head whips and spit flies when he says God .

Andrew says, “ This isn’t the same tape. He doesn’t say these things. ”

Anneke feels gooseflesh ripple down her left side.

“…Of course, a man doesn’t say, never, is no God. A man does not say that he is denying of God if he wants to farm the benefits of ‘polite’ society.”

Bill gets up from his desk, walks over to a curtained window.

The camera follows him.

“Ichabod?” Andrew says. “I command you to stop tampering with this tape.”

Nothing. This is not Ichabod’s doing. The entity doesn’t leave the warm tingle of magic in a room; rather a sort of dead, flat emptiness.

This room is tingling.

On the television, Bill grabs the cord to the curtains, turns to address the camera.

“But when a man knows heartfully how society can be not polite, hey, sometimes fully rude, we are forgiving him for crying himself atheist.”

Bill pulls the cord.

The film jerks, jumps out of frame, goes white, comes back on.

A bad splice.

Bill is standing in the same spot, but the colors have shifted.

Orange and red light tints everything.

The sound of propeller planes outside.

Bombers?

Help me, bomber!

Out the windows, fire.

A city on fire.

Stalingrad?

The window Bill opens is on the third or fourth floor of a building that shakes now as a bomb explodes nearby.

A chorus of screaming rises up.

“Oh God,” Anneke says.

Now the film jerks again.

The tame, grainy interior colors from the original tape return.

The curtain has been closed, or was never opened, and Bill is sitting at his desk again.

Only the silver water pitcher is gone.

A nearly empty bottle of vintage Soviet vodka has replaced it, a darkly handsome Joseph Stalin leering on the label beneath the Cyrillic legend NOT ONE STEP BACK!

Bill’s necktie hangs sloppy and loose, the first buttons of his shirt undone. His hair uncombed. He is drunk.

The sounds of war have gone away.

A musician of small talent plays a violin in another room.

“Do you see what you have driven me to?” he says, in Ukrainian-accented Russian, looking at Andrew.

“Stop it,” Andrew says, pointing authoritatively at the television.

“Stop it!” shitfaced Bill Wilson says, in English, mocking him, laughing, pointing.

Andrew presses the power button on the remote.

The television flicks off.

Then turns itself back on .

Bill points at Andrew, says, in Russian, “You think you got away with something, don’t you? But your time has run out. We know where you are. And we are coming.”

Subtitles appear in yellow, doubtless for Anneke’s benefit.

“You will die, you sloppy little shit. Sloppy. Weak. Little. Shit.”

“Who are you?”

Bill W. smiles, but it’s not a pleasant smile.

The image freezes.

The celluloid burns exactly where his mouth is, burns in the nearly flat U of his smile. His eyes burn, too.

The violin stops.

Now the television screen begins to smoke where the mouth and eyes were.

Anneke jumps to her feet, puts the couch between her and the Sony.

“Christ!” Andrew yells.

The television catches fire.

The fire is magical in origin, but thankfully not in nature; an ordinary extinguisher stifles it in seconds. Not that the house would burn; Andrew set very powerful dousing wards at every corner of the property. The smoke alarm goes off, hurting their ears with its shrill chirps. Andrew sets down the extinguisher, silences the alarm. The room is murky with smoke and nitrogen. Anneke, her stomach still queasy following her belly flop out of sobriety, fights the urge to heave.

“Well,” Andrew says, “this is what magic looks like when used as a weapon. It’s not pretty.”

“Nothing’s pretty when used as a weapon.”

“I love your zero-tolerance approach to bullshit.”

“You’re trying to sound authoritative, like you’re in control. But you’re not, are you?”